The overall goal of this project is to design, fabricate and implement a new general system for flow cytometric data acquisition and analysis. This system will acquire data, control sorting, have a computer based use interface for control of numerous instrument parameters and provide new data display and analysis capabilities. The new system is being designed and constructed using state-of-the-art electronic circuit design and fabrication tools, computers, operating systems, and high level display languages. The system under development has been given the name Digital Data Acquisition and Control system - DiDAC. We propose to develop this modular system to meet the individualized needs of four instruments housed in the NFCR: the multiparameter flow cytometer, the phase sensitive detection flow cytometer, the optical sorter, and the fast kinetics flow cytometer. The aims are to develop the following modular capabilities for integration into the instruments: data acquisition hardware, sort control hardware, instrument control and data display/analysis software. Implementation of the DiDAC system will take the NFCR data acquisition and display capabilities from inadequate by contemporary standards to beyond the current state-of-the-art. The result will be an improvement in the data acquisition systems capabilities for NFCR research instruments and for collaborators and, as the history of technology transfer from the NFCR has demonstrated, this activity will also have a large impact on the flow cytometry community at large.